Baseball Page 6

  In August of 1918, at the age of thirty-eight, Mathewson signed up for the war out of a sense of responsibility. By now he was the manager of the Cincinnati Reds because his close friend, McGraw, had made sure he had a job when his arm wore out. Mathewson joined the Chemical Warfare Services, along with two other future members of the Hall of Fame—Tyrus Raymond Cobb, thirty-two, the eleven-time batting champion, and Branch Wesley Rickey, thirty-eight, the cerebral college man, once a marginal catcher but now the president of the Browns.

  These three relatively elderly soldiers were sent to France, near the Belgian border. Mathewson arrived with the flu, which would soon kill millions of people around the world, and then, in a training exercise, Mathewson accidentally inhaled murderous mustard gas. Later he took another dose of gas near the front. After the Armistice on November 11, 1918, Mathewson returned home a weakened and aged man and he later caught tuberculosis, dying at forty-five.

  Cobb was the antithesis of Matty and Rickey, two college men and respecters of the Sabbath. An umpire-baiter, spike-sharpener, fan-fighter, and teammate-battler with racist tendencies, Cobb became the first great hitter of the century. A review of his records suggests his career average was .366, not the traditional .367. Unpopular with opponents and teammates alike, Cobb confirmed the image of baseball players as crude and uneducated and sometimes even racist.

  At the same time, many players were lionized, often appearing in vaudeville music halls in the off-season, recognized through their photographs in magazines and the copious newspapers of the time. Some were immortalized by doggerel like “Baseball's Sad Lexicon,” by Franklin Pierce Adams in New York's Evening Mail of July 10, 1910, lauding the Cubs' double-play combination of shortstop Joe Tinker, second baseman Johnny Evers, and first baseman Frank Chance.

  These are the saddest of possible words:

  “Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

  Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,

  Tinker and Evers and Chance.

  Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,

  Making a Giant hit into a double—

  Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:

  “Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

  Adams's tribute was not as cosmically inventive as the citing of Abner Doubleday as the inventor of baseball, but these eight lines became embedded in the minds of fans everywhere, and perhaps even sportswriters. Tinker, Evers, and Chance were all fine players, who played together as a unit for 10 years, a rarity then and now, but they were not an unprecedented double-play machine, either. In direct response to Adams's little ditty, all three were eventually voted into the Hall of Fame, Evers in 1939 and his teammates in 1946.

  While accumulating a folklore, the young industry of baseball was also developing new labor and financial problems. In 1913, the Fraternity of Professional Baseball Players was founded, leading to the outlaw Federal League of 1914, which raided the two major leagues. Connie Mack's A's won four pennants from 1910 through 1914, but after Chief Bender and Eddie Plank jumped to the Federal League, and Home Run Baker sat out a season in a salary dispute, Mack tore apart his team even further, selling a number of players to the Red Sox (who would soon move their better players to the Yankees). The A's soon hit bottom. “The Federal League wrecked my club by completely changing the spirit of my players,” Mack would claim.

  The two established leagues survived a restraint-of-trade suit by the upstart Federal League. In 1915, a Chicago federal judge, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, said he was “shocked” that anybody could possibly consider baseball to be “labor.” It was a game, Landis ruled, and, as a national institution, it was not subject to interstate commerce laws. This decision by Landis was vital to the owners because it strengthened the reserve clause, which appeared to bind players to their clubs for the length of their careers, or until they were traded, sold, or discarded. The reserve clause would dominate the industry for the next six decades.

  As the war dragged on, attendance was down in the 1918 World Series, which led to a dispute over the size of World Series shares. Before the fifth game, the Red Sox and Cubs demanded minimum shares of $1,500 and $1,000 for winning and losing, respectively, insisting they were prepared to cancel the game. When baseball officials worried that a strike could cause a riot, the players gave in, starting the game an hour late. In the end, the Red Sox were paid only $1,108 per player and the Cubs $671 each. This strike threat was one of the justifications the Red Sox' ownership would use for dealing Babe Ruth to the Yankees at the end of 1919. Management convinced reporters in Boston and New York to depict Ruth as a malingerer, not just because of his undisciplined habits but also because of his salary demands and his role as potential striker.

  With the owners receiving fawning decisions like that of Judge Landis, and with a growing public perception that baseball was the national game, the players were burdened with the expectation that they were somehow above labor grievances. Many players saw themselves as underpaid and exploited. The stage was set for base-ball's first major scandal.

  VI

  THE BLACK SOX

  They are the lost boys of baseball, lashed together, eight of them, in a ship that can never return to harbor. Even today, as the eight exiles from the 1919 Chicago White Sox bob outside the boundaries of their sport, they are a living reminder of what can go wrong when leadership fails.

  Christy Mathewson could see it happening, right below him. Weakened from his wartime gassing, he had been unable to resume his job as manager of the Reds, but agreed to write about the 1919 World Series for the New York World. He sat in the press box next to his friend Hugh Fullerton of the Chicago Herald and Examiner, who had been warned of a possible gambling conspiracy.

  The former pitcher and the diligent reporter watched the body language and the positioning, not merely the hits and the errors. They spotted the White Sox' catcher, Ray (Cracker) Schalk, arguing with Lefty Williams, one of the Sox' best pitchers, out near the mound, and detected Kid Gleason, the manager, in a visible fury. The two friends operated on the theory that hitters hated to give up base hits and, if they wanted to hurt their own team, would much prefer to botch a play on defense. Mathewson and Fullerton began circling suspicious defensive plays by some of the most adept fielders on the Sox—not overt fumbles or bad throws but perhaps a slight hesitancy or elliptical route to the ball, turning a single into a double, just enough to affect a game.

  Few fans picked up on these nuances. The nation had been stunned by the whiff of mortality during the war that had affected even a golden man like Mathewson. Once able to pitch every few days, he was now a pale specter hunched over his scorecard. The prevalent mood of the nation—even with Prohibition on the way— was, Let's have a drink.

  Certainly, the baseball owners were not looking for trouble. The game had bounced back, attendance leaped from 3 million in 1918 to 6.5 million in 1919. Happy days were here again. The owners had not developed any centralized leadership, making Ban Johnson the most powerful executive, giving him freedom to feud with renegade owners as well as successive National League presidents. The friendly ruling by Judge Landis in Chicago had enforced the owners' control of the players.

  Like the rest of the country, the owners wanted a respite from the sudden chilling awareness that America was linked to the rest of the world. People were back at work, making money, investing money, spending money. The game was one other way of forgetting. Gambling was another. The managing job had opened up for Mathewson in Cincinnati because the Reds' ownership had been hesitant to choose the more logical candidate, Hal Chase, the stylish first baseman, who had a reputation as a gambler. McGraw had volunteered his surrogate son, Mathewson, as an alternative to the high-living first baseman known as Prince Hal.

  As a novice manager, Mathewson observed Chase occasionally bungle a play by making a slightly inaccurate toss to the pitcher or fail to reach a ground ball, plays he would normally make with ease. Mathewson learned that Chase had handed a young pitcher $50, saying he h
ad bet on the Reds to lose, but the charge was ignored by John Heydler, the weak president of the National League. Mathewson inexplicably shipped Chase to his friend McGraw, who, by 1918, banished Chase from the Giants. The long tolerance of Chase had built up a climate of gambling in baseball. Now there were volunteers for a bigger scandal.

  —

  In 1919, gamblers found disillusioned players on the South Side of Chicago, toiling for the White Sox of Charles Comiskey. Once an artist at first base and a key member of an early players association, Comiskey now showed nothing but disdain for the current players, who were bound to him by the reserve clause. He had accumulated a superlative squad, but paid most players far below the norm. Eddie Collins, from Columbia University, made sure his $14,500 salary was guaranteed when he came over from Connie Mack's Athletics, but Joe Jackson, the great hitter, illiterate and vulnerable, was paid only $6,000 a year. Many players also felt Comiskey failed to honor bonus agreements, leading to a gnawing sense they were being exploited. In the definitive book on the scandal, Eight Men Out, published in 1963, Eliot Asinof blames Comiskey for the players' willingness to be corrupted, and so does John Sayles's brooding movie of the same name, which came out a quarter of a century later.

  Late in the 1919 season, as the White Sox prepared to play the Reds in the World Series, various characters buzzed around the Sox, trying to find somebody to corrupt. They found their man in Chick Gandil, a skillful first baseman who had turned thirty-two and was looking to make one big score before his career ran out.

  Like many clubs, even the most successful, the White Sox were split into factions based on education, temperament, and region. Seeking teammates who would go along, Gandil studiously avoided Collins, the captain and second baseman, and Schalk, the peppery little catcher.

  Gandil ultimately contacted seven other players. Buck Weaver, the third baseman, apparently sat in on the first meeting but never participated or discussed the plot. However, Gandil gained at least tacit approval from Eddie Cicotte and Williams, the two best pitchers, as well as Oscar (Happy) Felsch, the center fielder, Fred Mc-Mullin, a reserve infielder, Swede Risberg, the shortstop, and Joe Jackson, the right fielder, one of the great hitters of his time or any other time.

  The gamblers, as dysfunctional as the eight White Sox players, could produce only $10,000 before the start of the Series. Gandil invested it all in Cicotte, a veteran pitcher with a family, a mortgage, and a grudge against Comiskey.

  As the best-of-nine Series opened in Cincinnati, there was a new player in this crooked game, as dominant in his world as Joe Jackson was in his. Arnold Rothstein from New York was less of a gambler than a believer in sure things. He did not want to confirm his bet until he had a sign that the fix was in, so he told his intermediaries that Cicotte should hit the first batter with a pitch, as a sign of good faith. Keeping track in New York, Rothstein watched the Teletype clatter that Cicotte had hit Morrie Rath with the first pitch, and only then did Rothstein lay down $100,000 on the Reds. Cicotte paid off, lasting only three innings in a 9–1 loss. Other players in on the plot began demanding their share of the money, but Williams came through with one wild inning in a 4–2 loss, putting the White Sox behind, two games to none.

  Many fans and bettors, stunned to see the favored White Sox falling behind so decisively, traded rumors of a blatant dump. Comiskey, knowing the high talent level of his players, sensed something was wrong and late one night shared his concerns with Heydler, the president of the rival league. Comiskey would not have this conversation with Johnson, the president of his own league, because the two of them despised each other. Heydler relayed Comiskey's concerns to Johnson, whose reaction was: “That is the whelp of a beaten cur.”

  Inevitably, the seven active participants became resentful when the next installment of payoffs did not come through. Most of them reverted to trying hard on every play, which made it easier for Dickie Kerr, a small rookie pitcher, to win the third game for Chicago. Cicotte and Williams made sure the White Sox lost the fourth and fifth games at home and the Series reverted to Cincinnati, where Kerr won again. Cicotte, perhaps sensing this plot would all come crashing down on him, pitched his best in the seventh game and won. But when the Series returned to Chicago for the eighth game, Williams was warned by a menacing stranger that his family would be harmed if he did not cooperate. The Reds scored four runs in the first inning, and soon Cincinnati became the champion. Arnold Rothstein made a bundle, mostly by not betting on individual games but by wisely trusting the dumpers to perform their task in the longer run. Other gamblers were not so wise, betting the wrong way in games the White Sox won.

  Mathewson, for all the circles on his scorecard and his history with Hal Chase in Cincinnati, never referred to the discrepancies when he filed his newspaper articles from the Series. Fullerton, who had predicted the Sox would win, made not-very-reassuring comments that, despite rumors of a gambling coup, the Reds were winning on the up-and-up. At the same time, Ring Lardner, the author and columnist with the Chicago Tribune, made some sour comments in print and even directed pointed remarks at the White Sox players during the Series. He was said to have sung a parody of “I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles” that included the lyrics “I'm forever blowing ball games, and the gamblers treat us fair.”

  In the media circus of the twenty-first century, one would like to think that an open cabal by eight players on one team would surely come to the attention, or at least the paranoia, of assorted reporters, announcers, and bloggers—but look how long it took for all of us to pay attention to the steroids plague of the late 1990s. At most, the few public hints prodded Comiskey to release a statement that said, in part, “I believe my boys fought the battles of the recent World Series on the level, as they have always done.” He did, however, withhold the eight players' World Series shares, $3,154.27 each, and announced a reward of $20,000 for any information about a gambling scandal. In mid-November he released the eight checks to the players, presumably hoping the scandal would blow over. It did not.

  After seven of the eight players played for the Sox through 1920, the scandal began to be investigated by a grand jury in Chicago. The players were so uneducated that they allowed Comiskey's staff to furnish them free legal advice, which was to cooperate with the grand jury, on the promise the club would protect them. Jackson, who depended on his wife to read his contracts, spoke openly to the grand jury, without benefit of counsel. The players were found not guilty, and celebrated in public, assuming they could play the following season.

  The owners, however, realized they needed to restore some semblance of faith in baseball. Some had grown tired of the power Ban Johnson had wielded over the years and on November 12, 1920, they hired a commissioner, the very same Chicago federal judge, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who had given them such a favorable decision back in the 1915 Federal League case. (Landis had acquired his name because his father, a Union medic, had been shot in the leg during a Civil War battle at Kennesaw Mountain outside Marietta, Georgia. The dropping of one “n” appears to have been nothing more than a misspelling.)

  With his thick shock of white hair and his rugged profile backing up his cachet as the owners' new hammer, Landis summarily banned all eight players for life. “Birds of a feather flock together,” he said in a press release. “Men associating with gamblers and crooks could expect no leniency.”

  None of the eight Black Sox would ever play organized ball again. Weaver, in particular, seemed shocked at being banished, since by all accounts he had never cooperated with the plot, or taken money, or slacked off during the Series. He had failed to report what he had heard, and that was quite enough for Landis and the suddenly militant owners. The eight players, who ranged from sinister (Gandil) to naive (Weaver), were linked for life, and beyond. Their expulsion from the Garden would stand as the game's Original Sin, haunting the White Sox franchise into the next century.

  While Judge Landis made an example of the eight White Sox, he proved to be more hesitant about lifeti
me punishment for two great players, Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker, who had apparently fixed a game in 1919 that affected the final standings. When that incident surfaced in 1926, Cobb was managing Detroit and Speaker Cleveland. Landis stepped back while Ban Johnson solved that problem by transferring both stars to other teams in 1927. So much for frontier justice.

  The punishment stuck on Shoeless Joe Jackson. Long after his death in 1951, he was adopted by no less an authority than Ted Williams, who spent his final decades urging that Jackson and his .356 career batting average be included in the Hall of Fame. The aging Williams, whose career average was .344, would rouse his most blustery logic in defense of his fellow slugger but to no avail.

  To justify its place as the national sport, baseball had come up with new penalties for gambling and fixing games, thus setting a tone for good-of-the-game decisions in future decades. There was some debate whether the public, now fully involved in the festivities of the Roaring Twenties, really cared. The fans were still drawn to the game, not necessarily because of the zealous Judge Landis but because of a lusty slugger named George Herman Ruth.

  VII

  THE BABE

  Baseball has always relied heavily on luck, touching the right nerves, somehow working its way into privileged folk status. Never was it luckier than in the wake of the Black Sox scandal, when Babe Ruth saved baseball—and saves it still, truth be told. With Barry Bonds and other latter-day sluggers permanently tainted by steroid suspicions, the good old Babe looks better and better.